17 Responses to “Source”

Damn. Just as I thought I’d vented all my frustration on the previous post, I read this.

Dear ‘allies’,

……Stop with the hyperbole, you stupid, stupid people, you’re making trans women look both like humourless harridans bent on depriving women of all the gains made in the last century and fragile victims of feminism.

Thank you.

Honestly, trans women aren’t dying because someone made a vagina cupcake, they are dying for exactly the same reasons that cis women are dying – toxic masculinity.

Stop doing this to trans people, it’s making things so much worse. We could all be feminist allies; cis, trans, women and men, supporting one another to bring about a better society. But if you are quibbling over cakes and blaming it on the fragility of trans women whilst preening about what a good ally you are, you are doing it rong.

The person who did this post is the one who has a Patreon account to get paid for doing posts like this on Facebook. She is on the other side of the planet from Auckland. She is trans activism’s worst nightmare.

A poem like that erases about 50% of humanity from existence. It denies us *any* words to describe our physical selves as a group. I am willing to cede women to people who feel like women, but when female no longer means anything and we have to pretend like our physical selves don’t exist to keep people’s feelings from being hurt, that’s destructive.

I acknowledge that I can’t pretend to speak for trans women. That said, isn’t this bullshit just a huge disservice to them? This isn’t anything near the same thing, but: I’m a cis woman. I’m flat-chested. I don’t particularly love that aspect of my physical appearance, but I accept it. If I attended a feminist gathering and they were celebrating womanhood via boobie cupcakes, I would not take to Facebook and demand that they abjectly apologize or else be branded as misogynists for being insensitive to the feelies of flat-chested women.

Trans women who don’t have vaginas are *surely* very aware that they don’t have vaginas and don’t think that that fact makes them not women. So why do we assume they’re going to be crushed by the existence of vagina cupcakes? Aren’t they grown-ups who understand how the world works (indeed, perhaps with a greater understanding, in certain ways, than some of us who haven’t experienced their situation)? These protests just strike me as infantilizing trans women.

If your genitals aren’t supposed to matter, aren’t supposed to be anyone’s business – and I agree – why are genitalia cupcakes such a sin?

All that said: I might well be wrong. If so, I would welcome any input, especially from trans people.

Hang on, doesn’t the original set of claims that trans women are (all the things) mean that no trans person should have any need for either hormone therapy or sex reassignment surgery? – since according to the claim they already have the right hormones, genitals etc.?

The need for physical transitioning exists for 2 reasons: one is to have a body that one feels comfortable with and the other is to make one’s gender obvious to others. None of this contradicts referring to one’s pre-transition body as being of the sex that matches one’s gender based tautologically on the fact that the body on question belongs to an individual of that gender.

A transwoman who has not yet transitioned medically is a woman, therefore her body is the body of that particular woman, therefore it is a woman’s body. But the woman in question is not happy with the body, and other people who see the woman often think she is a man, so she seeks to change her body in order to solve (or ameliorate) both problems.

Perhaps the phrasing that accounts for all the facts is that the trans woman’s pre-transition body is not a body typical of a woman.